The Mayan Codex (5 page)

This new breed of men and women infesting the upper echelons of the police department had no earthly sense of history – no earthly sense of what was seemly or appropriate in terms of their behaviour. When Calque had told the Commandant of his initial suspicions about the Countess and her baker’s dozen of adopted children – Calque had briefly been tempted to call them by the more accurate medieval term of a ‘Devil’s dozen’ but had thought better of it – the man had as good as laughed in his face.

‘Achor Bale was a freak. A one-off. What do you think? That someone as respectable as the Countess of Hyères – who must be seventy if she’s a day – has been grooming a family full of killer orphans to fulfil her late husband’s 800-year-old sworn duty of protecting the French Crown from the Devil? Captain Calque, this may come as a surprise to you, but there
is
no Devil. And there is no French Crown any more, either. The last King of France was Louis-Philippe. And he was got rid of in
…’ The Commandant had hesitated, a vague sense of betrayal suffusing his face.

‘They got rid of Louis-Philippe in 1848. But he wasn’t the last King of France. He was the last King of the French. The last reigning King of France was Charles X. You’ve heard of him, surely?’

‘You’re skating on very thin ice here, Captain.’

‘I know that the Countess was running Bale while he was cutting his murderous swathe across France. That she had ordered him to harry the American, Adam Sabir, and his two Gypsy friends, Alexi Dufontaine and Yola Samana, to death. That she was convinced Sabir knew the identity of Nostradamus’s Third Antichrist. A secret the Corpus Maleficus needed to secure if it was to continue with its sworn duty of protecting France from the Devil.’

‘Pah.’

Calque was fleetingly tempted to throw in the information Sabir had vouchsafed him, in the strictest confidence, about the possible existence of the Second Coming, but decided that discretion was the better part of valour. The situation already sounded terminally far-fetched. Why aggravate the issue even further? The Commandant was probably an atheist anyway – he was certainly incapable of any significant degree of lateral thought. ‘Achor Bale took his orders directly from the Countess, his mother. That makes her an accessory before the fact. In fact I would even go so far as to say that she was a joint principal.’ Calque realized that he might be stretching the point a little. ‘A great deal more than a simple conspirator, anyway.’

‘Have you any proof of that?’

‘He called her from the Maset. When he was in trouble. He asked her if he could come home. She told him to finish the job. To kill Sabir.’

‘No he didn’t. He spoke to that butler of hers…’ The Commandant ransacked his memory, unconsciously pandering to Calque’s notorious pedantry. ‘ … Millefeuille.’

‘Milouins.’

‘Milouins then. And Milouins replied to him partly in German. He used the word
Fertigmachen
. Which could have any number of meanings. From “go away and off yourself, you murderous bastard”, to “let’s make an end of it here and now”. But Bale never spoke to the Countess personally – the evidence that the order came from her is purely circumstantial. But we’ve already been over this, Captain.’

‘I’ve seen that hidden room at the Countess’s house, Commandant. I’ve seen the document she keeps in there. The one that mentions a secret society called the Corpus Maleficus.’

‘But the document was indecipherable. Written in an unknown code. You’ve acknowledged that much yourself. Damn it, man, the thing was dated 1250. What earthly connection can it have with a crime committed today?’

‘It wasn’t dated 1250. It was post-dated 1228. We know this because it contained the non-coded signatures and seals of three men crucial to King Louis the IX’s realm. One man, Jean de Joinville, would have been four years old at the time of the signing. An impossibility, of course. So the document was clearly enacted retrospectively – possibly in appreciation of an act whose real significance was only recognized later.’

‘For pity’s sake, Captain. We all know about your absurd pretensions to a classical education – you made Paul Macron’s life a misery with them. You’ve no way of knowing this, but a week before his death Macron put in an informal complaint against you for psychological harassment.’

‘Psychological harassment?’ Calque wanted a cigarette badly, but, thanks to the new ruling, he knew that if he dared to light up, his superior would probably call in the Paris Fire Brigade to put him out with a hosepipe.

‘We persuaded him that it was in his own best interests to shelve the complaint. Your long service with the department still counts for something, you see. But the complaint can easily be resuscitated – even from beyond the grave – and all the more damaging for that. However, we are straying off the point. From here on in you will leave the Countess and her children alone. Do you understand me? The case is over. Bale is dead.’

‘You mean she’s too well-connected to tangle with?’

‘In a nutshell, Captain? Yes.’

It was at that exact moment that Joris Calque had decided that his injuries from the car accident were a good deal more severe than he had ever let on. A stumble or two in the office, followed by a full-on fall had been quite enough to start the ball rolling. He had then found difficulty remembering simple things. Been forced to acknowledge to the Chief Medical Officer that he had been suffering from blackouts ever since the accident, and that he had recently been entertaining thoughts of suicide because of his guilt at Paul Macron’s death.

The whole process had proved surprisingly simple. He had only had five more years to serve out anyway until forcible retirement – in the event they had been glad to be rid of him. Clear up the office. Out with the unregenerate males. Bring in new blood.

Calque had left the building without so much as a backwards glance. The icing on the cake had been that his ruinous-to-maintain ex-wife would now be deprived of her legally sanctioned monthly tranche of his pay
cheque. Because he had been invalided out of the service with full honours and an unblemished record, and had, in consequence, been deemed incapable of functioning at 100 per cent of his usual competence thanks to the injuries – not to mention the post-traumatic stress – he had suffered whilst on active duty, the State would now be taking up a significant portion of the financial slack on his behalf. And the State, as Calque knew only too well, didn’t go in for guilty consciences.

Grinning to himself, Calque leaned back in his blow-up armchair and focused his binoculars onto the front entrance to the Countess’s house. He had been watching the place, day in, day out, for five weeks now. The routine had become a way of life for him. He had banked everything on his belief that the Countess would quite naturally have sought to maintain a low profile for a month or two after her adopted son’s death. No muddying of the waters. No gathering in of the clan. And so far he had been proved right.

But Calque had known that it wouldn’t last. The woman was reptilian – as cold-blooded as a coral snake. It was inconceivable that she shouldn’t contrive some sort of revenge on Adam Sabir for the killing of the demented Bale. And Sabir had proved on more than one occasion how blind he was to any potential danger.

So Calque had decided to spend the early part of his unanticipated retirement doing what he had always done best – protecting the public. Except in this case the public consisted of precisely one individual, the errant American writer Adam Sabir. And the forces of law and order were no longer officially sanctioned, with the full panoply of the State’s legal mechanisms backing them up, but merely consisted of one overweight, overeducated, and terminally underfunded former policeman.

Why was he doing it? Boredom? Sour grapes? Resentment at the truncation of his decreasingly high-flying career? None of that. The truth was that Sabir had touched a surprisingly sensitive nerve in the usually unsentimental Calque with his mysterious tales of the Second Coming and of the rapidly approaching Armageddon predicted in the 52 lost verses of Nostradamus – verses that Sabir had managed to memorize before his final reckoning with Achor Bale. Calque’s intellectual vanity had been aroused – and his latent republican ire had been triggered – by the Countess’s inbred assumption that she and her aristocratic ilk would always win out in the end.

This new, knight-errant version of the formerly cynical Joris Calque had attended Achor Bale’s funeral, therefore, and had noted with satisfaction the absence of Bale’s twelve remaining brothers and sisters. Only the Countess and her near-ubiquitous personal assistant, Madame Mastigou, had bothered to turn up.

But the Countess would have to convoke them at some point. Bring them up to scratch. And the telephone or the internet just wouldn’t do – far too many loopholes and opportunities for covert surveillance. That meant that her children would have to return to the domaine de Seyème – and to the secret room one of his officers had unexpectedly discovered behind the library – in person. That was where the Corpus Maleficus held its meetings, wasn’t it? That was where they hatched their schemes?

And that was where Joris Calque had illegally hidden a voice-activated tape recorder whilst he was busy conducting his entirely legal search of the Countess’s house nearly eight weeks before.

The recently entitled Abiger de Bale, Chevalier, Comte d’Hyères, Marquis de Seyème, Pair de France,
primus inter pares
, bundled his twin brother ahead of him up the steps of the TGV. ‘Go on, Pollux. Move your arse.’

‘Stop calling me Pollux. My name is Vaulderie.’

‘All right then. I’ll call you Vaulderie from now on. Vicomte Vaulderie. How’s that? Now you sound like a sexually transmitted disease.’

The twins threw themselves down in opposing seats in the first-class carriage. Vaulderie kicked out at a cushion. ‘Why should I be a mere vicomte when you’re a fucking comte? Why should you be the one to snaffle Rocha’s title?’

‘Because I was the last one to emerge from our mother. That’s the Napoleonic Code for you. Last out, first conceived. Enlightened primogeniture,
mon pote
. Christ. Just think. If it wasn’t for King Clovis, our fallen angel of a sister would have inherited instead of me. She’s two years older.
Maltho ti afrio lito
.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘Salic Law, dummy. Male primogeniture. It’s what saved our bacon.’

‘No. The other bit.’

‘It’s the only full sentence left in Old Frankish. “I tell you. I free you. Half free.” Complete gobbledegook, of course. Be thankful you’ve got a title at all. If Rocha hadn’t let that pig of a policeman loose off a shot at him, you’d have remained a commoner all your life. Now you’re a real vicomte you can flash your
chevalière
ring at all the girls and their pants will automatically fall down. Just like I’ve been doing for years.’

Vaulderie launched another kick at the seat cushion, but harder this time. ‘It’s not fair. If we’d been born in England, I would have been the senior of us two. First out is considered the eldest there.’

‘Lucky for me we weren’t born in England, then. We’d have had an idiot as head of the family.’

The brothers, despite the fact that they were all of twenty-five years old, began to wrestle. Watching them, the off-duty railway security inspector – who was availing himself of his free first-class travel privileges – thought yet again how lucky France was to have a Republic. It was always these young blue bloods, off for the weekend, who caused the most trouble on his trains. He could see their signet rings flashing as they fought for control of each other’s throats.

‘That’s enough. I’ll have no rough-housing here.’ He eased his way up the central aisle and flashed his badge at the boys.

Both young men straightened up and smoothed back their hair. ‘Sorry, Colonel. It won’t happen again. We were only mud-larking.’

The inspector was rather taken aback. He had expected trouble. These two had all the earmarks of their class. Absurdly well-cut hair. Double-breasted grey flannel suits that fitted them like a second skin. Not an ounce of excess fat on the pair of them – fencing, probably, or some exclusive tennis club with a five-year waiting list. When he looked at them more closely, he was astonished to realize that they were identical twins.

He shrugged, not a little disarmed by their unanticipated courtesy. ‘I won’t take your names this time, as we’re nearly at my destination. You’re lucky – you’ve both got off more lightly than you deserve. But remember.’ He pointed above his head. ‘There are security cameras on this train.’